The ladies vied with each other to attack this unimpressible
nature,--this profound isolation from external attraction. They
followed him about, they looked into his dark, melancholy eyes; it was
impossible, they thought, that he could continue this superb acting
forever. A glance, a smile, a burst of ingenuous confidence, a covert
appeal to his chivalry would yet catch him tripping. But the melancholy
eyes that had gazed at the treasures of Ashley Grange and the
opulent ease of its guests without kindling, opened to their first
emotion,--wonder! At which Lady Elfrida, who had ingenuously admired
him, hated him a little, as the first step towards a kindlier feeling.

The next day, having declared his intention of visiting Ashley Church,
and, as frankly, his intention of going there alone, he slipped out in
the afternoon and made his way quietly through the park to the square
ivied tower he had first seen. In this tranquil level length of the wood
there was the one spot, the churchyard, where, oddly enough, the green
earth heaved into little billows as if to show the turbulence of that
life which those who lay below them had lately quitted. It was a
relief to the somewhat studied and formal monotony of the well-ordered
woodland,--every rood, of which had been paced by visitors, keepers, or
poachers,--to find those decrepit and bending tombstones, lurching
at every angle, or deeply sinking into the green sea of forgetfulness
around them. All this, and the trodden paths of the villagers towards
that common place of meeting, struck him as being more human than
anything he had left behind him at the Grange.

He entered the ivy-grown porch and stared for a moment at the half-legal
official parochial notices posted on the oaken door,--his first
obtrusive intimation of the combination of church and state,--and
hesitated. He was not prepared to find that this last resting-place of